This issue is for discussing whether we should adopt some of the release schedule adopted for Drupal 8 in #2135189: Proposal to manage the Drupal core release cycle for Drupal 7 too.
The short version:
- Drupal 7 would use the same 6 month "minor release" schedule that Drupal 8 will use (i.e. rather than features coming out in random monthly point releases like they currently do, they would be batched and come out on 6 month intervals - with only bug/security fixes in the point releases that come out in between).
- The 6-month minor release for Drupal 7 would come out on the same day as the 6-month minor release for Drupal 8 (i.e. we would start this on the same day that 8.1.0 comes out).
- A pseudo-semantic versioning scheme would be adopted. E.g., Drupal 7.41, 7.42, 7.43, would be bugfix/security releases, then jump to 7.50 for the 6-month minor release, then repeat. As far as I know, the Update Manager module in core can handle these kinds of "jumps" in the version numbers just fine, though we should probably double check.
See #2135189-90: Proposal to manage the Drupal core release cycle and onward for more details and further discussion.